Hiromi Tango creates sculptures of colorful textiles, neon, and mirrors, then interacts with the pieces as performance art, like this exploration of the amygdala, part of her Dynamic Emotions series.
Sometimes explained as the brain's smoke detector, the amygdala attaches emotional information to memories, influencing how strongly embedded those memories become, and triggering responses to similar experiences based on those memories. This can play an important role in survival, such as helping us to quickly determine whether a situation might be dangerous, based on past experience. But traumatic memories can cause us to over-react to ordinary situations as well, negatively impacting our daily lives by triggering overwhelming fear or sadness when there is no danger. As an artist, I am able to take license to explore these ideas without the burden of proof. These works builds on the shape of the amygdala, imagined through light sculpture, and the complex interconnections of thousands of fibres that process information in and out of this mysterious centre.
Jason Findley's photography captures the colorful energy of the sculpture and the artist's interaction with it.
Ceramic artist Richard Notkin is famed for his clay teapots, inspired by the traditional Yixing style from China but forming a vehicle for political commentary in the west. In the interview above, you can see him work: "the vessel is the primary canvas of ceramics and the teapot is the most complex of vessels." [via […]
Originating in the 15th century, kintsugi is the Japanese art/craft of repairing cracks in pottery by obviously filling in the breaks with lacquer and gold or other precious metals to celebrate the imperfections. Artist Victor Solomon, whose "Literally Balling" series is about basketball and opulence, applied kintsugi to a deteriorating basketball court in southern Los […]
Freeman Vines is a luthier in Fountain, North Carolina. For half a century, he's crafted beautiful guitars from wood taken from a tree used to lynch Black people. Vines deeply moving work is the subject of a new photography book, Hanging Tree Guitars, with tintype images by Timothy Duffy and essays by Zoe Van Buren […]
Even as the world takes tentative steps toward reopening against the ebbs and flows of COVID-19, movie theaters remain in a netherworld limbo. High-profile film releases continue shuffling as theater chains, studios and filmgoers grapple with the fact that an enclosed theater may not be a safe place to be for some time to come. […]
The year 2020 has basically kicked down that door and dragged us all into the Zoom age, whether we like it or not. And now that we're basically inviting our boss, co-workers and other business associates into our homes via video, we've unwittingly stumbled into all kinds of new potential for embarrassment. Like when you're […]
One million Americans use American Sign Language as their primary means of communication. But as you'd expect, even though ASL is the sixth-most used language in the US, it isn't just any old language like English or Spanish or French. According to Communication Service for the Deaf, 98 percent of Deaf people don't receive education […]
